For pay or for obligation, but not because it's just fun. You cannot tell me that finding someone else's financial records online and then applying your approa

For pay or for obligation, but not because it's just fun. You cannot tell me that finding someone else's financial records online and then applying your approach to accounting on them, just for kicks, is happening. Maybe if you're a finance researcher... but no, not even then. Doing side programming because you get paid, or because you have an idea that you think could be useful or marketable later, yeah that happens. Doing side projects because you want to learn a new language or tool, hoping it will make you more able to do your work better in the future, sure. That's a great reason. There are actually a lot of good reasons to do side programming. But making that a big part of a hiring process is unnecessarily focusing on a behavior that is arguably not going to separate a good candidate from an average candidate. I'm sure there's a lot of really garbage side project code out there.